Send us Fan Mail With this episode, READING MCCARTHY has discussed every novel published by Cormac McCarthy. Published in early December of 2022, STELLA MARIS was the last novel published by McCarthy in his lifetime. The second book in a pair of sibling novels about the Westerns, STELLA MARIS consists of a series of interviews between the troubled genius Alicia Western and a research psychiatrist. Alicia first appears in THE PASSENGER, but it is in this novel that the spotlight is...

Send us Fan Mail Last October while attending the American Literature Association fiction symposium in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I managed to sequester two live, dyed-in-the-wool employed philosophers who also happen to be Cormac McCarthy experts. My AV guy (which is me) thought to handle the situation in some arm chairs near an elevator using a very expensive microphone rig ($28 at least) which attached to my phone. So--the sound is challenging, but I hope that listeners will forge a...

Send us Fan Mail Rick Wallach, one of the founding members of the Cormac McCarthy Society and, indeed, of McCarthy studies in general, passed away on January 27th at the age of 75. A former president of the Cormac McCarthy Society, Rick taught English at the University of Miami. He instituted and was the senior editor of the Cormac McCarthy Society casebook series, and was the editor of the two-volume collection of essays Sacred Violence as well as Myth, Legend Dust: Critical Responses ...

Send us Fan Mail After a long break in which your intrepid host has contended with everything from eye surgery to accreditation, the second part of the panel discussion on The Counselor is finally here. Returning for the second part of his first appearance on the podcast is Dr. Russell Hillier, whose consideration of the screenplay first sparked my interest in examining the text again. He is Professor of English at Providence College, Rhode Island. He is the author of two books, Milton’...

Send us Fan Mail Full disclosure time here on the READING MCCARTHY podcast. When Ridley Scott’s film The Counselor arrived in theaters with its very own shiny McCarthy screenplay, I was underwhelmed. We’d been waiting for over half a decade for The Passenger and had no idea we’d be almost another ten years waiting for that project (and of course we had no concept of Stella Maris at the time). I found interesting elements in the film but didn’t think it held together. But people sm...

Send us Fan Mail For the podcast's 60th episode we are finally able to develop a lengthy and thorough discussion of The Passenger, McCarthy's penultimate novel from 2022. I'm joined by two returning guests of the podcast: Dr. Lydia Cooper is a professor of American literature and director of the core curriculum at Seattle University. Her specializations include Native American literature, Western and southwestern literature, and gender studies, and of course Cormac McCarthy. Her most re...

Send us Fan Mail Episode 60 of READING McCARTHY sees the return of one of my favorite guests, Dr. Stacey Peebles. In addition to her many other roles described below, she is the preeminent expert on McCarthy’s work in screenplays. Please join us for a consideration of his various screenplays, both produced (The Counselor) and unproduced (Cities of the Plain, No Country for Old Men, Men and Whales) as well as a brief discussion of the film adaptations of his work thus far. Stacey ...

Send us Fan Mail The 58th episode brings back the excellent Dr. Dianne Luce to discuss with us McCarthy’s 2006 play The Sunset Limited (or is it a novel in dramatic form?). Produced first by the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago in May of 2006, it later went on to open in New York. Dianne Luce saw it in Chicago during that opening run and we’ve both seen the Tommy Lee Jones directed film version which aired on HBO in 2011. The play shows two men, a cynical, atheist white professor an...

Send us Fan Mail This past December your not-so-intrepid host was able to make a pilgrimage to San Marcos, Texas, to visit the Wittliff Collection in the Alkek Library at Texas State University and plumb its treasure trove of McCarthy archives. My guest in this episode is Katie Salzmann, who has been Lead Archivist at The Wittliff Collections at Texas State since 2004. Prior to that, she worked with literary and historical manuscript collections at Southern Illinois University and Howar...

Send us Fan Mail This episode has a history that winds like a West Texas border road. My guests are the Brothers Elmore, and we originally recorded it in April but one of the tracks went bad. So finally at the end of our collective academic semesters, we once again discussed No Country for Old Men, speculating about its origins, its commentary on neo-liberalism, the film adaptation, and how some critics tried to read the author through the novel. Twin brothers, the Elmores c...